Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025) by Melissa Yi & Sara Leger

Why not mash up H.P. Lovecraft with poetry and art that reflects the diversity of the 21st century?

One poem for each month of the year, as an ebook, a book, a calendar, or a day planner, accompanied by nine pieces of art and this note from the artist herself.
—Melissa Yi & Sara Leger, Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025)

The work and person of H. P. Lovecraft has been inspiring poetry for a long time (e.g. “H. P. Lovecraft” (1937) by Elizabeth Toldridge, “Shadow Over Innsmouth” (1942) by Virginia Anderson & “The Woods of Averoigne” (1934) by Grace Stillman, etc.) and the form and nature of those works have been diverse, covering nearly every style and format of poem, from Cthulhu on Lesbos (2011) by David Jalajel to “Lovecraft Thesis #5” (2021) by Brandon O’Brien, from reflections on Lovecraft’s racism to new stories set in Lovecraft’s Mythos.

Melissa Yi (also published as Melissa Yuan-Innes) and artist Sara Leger bring their skills together for this small art project, which consists of 12 original poems in various styles (from Shakespearan sonnet to Japanese haiku), 10 of the poems that inspired those poems, and 9 original illustrations that capture something of the feel and aesthetic of the poems. The nature of these poems might be best illustrated by a side-by-side comparison of a poem and its source:

What happens to those interned? Is she tucked in a Straightjacket at night? Or dunked in ice water— If he puts up a fight? Do you extract her lady parts Plus her frontal lobe— Or electroshock him and restart? Perhaps seclude them in cells ’til they do what they’re told. Or do they grow bold?	What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
“Arkham” (November) by Melissa Yi	“Harlem” by Langston Hughes

Hughes’ “Harlem” (1951) is one of the most recognized and influential poems of the 20th century, not in least because it inspired the title to Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). The metaphor of the raisin in the sun speaks to the social and psychological forces that Black Americans and communities have, and continue, to face in a culture and society that holds high ideals of freedom while continuing to perpetuate prejudice and inequality at every level.

By taking “Harlem” as her model for “Arkham,” Yi is implicitly drawing on both the familiar poem’s form and its imagery by inference. Her “Arkham” is not the witch-haunted city, as Robert E. Howard wrote about in his poetic tribute, but the sanitarium, the good-bye-box where people who don’t fit in are locked away and subject to treatments and mistreatment, deprived of liberty and rights, subject to physical and psychological efforts to get them to conform to what society wants them to be.

“Arkham” doesn’t quite have the rhythm of “Harlem,” even though it is an obvious echo of Hughes’ trumpet blast. The imagery is pointed, but the target is hazy; lobotomies and electroconvulsive therapy weren’t a feature of mental health treatment in Lovecraft’s time, and ice-dunking and clitorectomies suggest still older institutions. So “Arkham” isn’t referencing a single institution at a given place or time, but the idea of the mental asylum, the sanitarium, the Bedlam of all times and places, the institutional limbo where a few of Lovecraft’s characters have ended up (which has become a literary trope).

It is a fun experiment. Not every poem works well on its own, but pairing them up with the originals does help show the work. Sara Leger‘s artwork is fun, though the print-on-demand publication doesn’t show it off to its best effect. The single best piece is the cover, with the eponymous Cthulhu’s Cheerleader striding forward, bloody pomp-poms in hand, wings spread, as the Big C looks on. While some folks might argue that Cthulhu doesn’t need a cheerleader, if he is to remain relevant into the 21st century and beyond, I think Cthulhu will need every cheerleader he can get.

Cthulhu’s Cheerleader (2025) by Melissa Yi & Sara Leger was published by Windtree Press.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“The Passionate Fantasophile” (1979) by Janice Arter & “To the Shade of HPL” (1981) by Margaret Carter

Dr. Jeanne Keyes Youngson founded the Count Dracula Fan Club in 1965 after a trip to Romania; this was before the publication of McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula (1972), but after the first full biography of Stoker, Harry Ludlam’s A Biography of Bram Stoker: Creator of Dracula (1962). It was the beginning of a serious opening-up of Dracula scholarship, serious scholarship that had fans and researchers scouring archives, uncovering Stoker’s original notes and manuscript, critically annotating and comparing different editions of the text. The work was international, and the fan club contained both enthusiastic vampire fiction fans and literary historians, and it published official journals and other publications.

In 1985, the Count Dracula Fan Club published an annual, a special Lovecraft-themed collectors issue. The highlight of the issue might be Kenneth W. Faig, Jr.’s brief article “The Revision of Dracula”—the first real address of the Lovecraft/Miniter Dracula revision anecdote from the Lovecraftian scholar’s point of view. However, it was full of more than that, including two neat little Mythos poems by women authors, “The Passionate Fantasophile” by Janice Arter and “To the Shade of HPL” by Margaret Carter.

“The Passionate Fantasophile” by Janice Arter

Published for the first time in The Further Perils of Dracula (1979), a Count Dracula Fan Club poetry anthology, Arter’s 18-line poem is a lyric poem, opening with the invitation “Come live with me and drink my blood,” and working through a list of familiar activites, including:

Come live with me and we shall learn
The power to make the oceans burn,
The secrets of the Scroll of Thoth,
The chant to summon Yog-Sothoth,
And we shall be as one.

This is a poem for lovers in multiple senses of the term. It is a very romantic invitation, of one horror fan to another, inviting activities that would be horroric to anyone except another horror fan. By the 70s, Lovecraft’s Mythos was being woven into the pantheon of familiar horrors, and Yog-Sothoth could comfortably rub shoulders next to vampires and witches. It is the kind of opening-of-the-heart that would only really work from one true horror fan to another, someone who will both get the references and the appeal of going to the Sabbath or dwelling in unimagined space with someone else who gets it.

“To the Shade of HPL” by Margaret Carter

Published for the first time in Daymares from the Crypt (1981), a chapbook collection of Carter’s poetry, and was re-released in an ebook of the same-name in 2012. Carter’s verse takes the form of an ode in 12 lines, a tribute to Lovecraft and the Mythos he had spawned, which Carter herself had contributed to over the years, and would continue to do so in the years to come. Some of the imagery is in the same vein as Arter’s poem, emphasizing the Mythos experience and aesthetic:

The hand that traced those tales of nameless lore
Never lent its grave-chilled touch to me—
Yet I have groped my way down Arkham’s hills
To watch the rites of Innsmouth by the sea.

The difference is, Carter isn’t just evoking Lovecraft’s Mythos, but Lovecraft himself. The Old Gent had already become a part of his own Mythos, his growing legend entwined with the stories he had written, and the artificial mythology being slowly expanded by fans and pros alike. Carter isn’t directly inviting the reader to participate in nameless rites or to dance with ghouls, but is expressing her own experience of doing so, made possible only by H. P. Lovecraft.

While both of these poems are fairly minor in the grand scheme of fantasy and horror literature, they are examples of the growing acceptance of Lovecraft and the Mythos in the 1980s, even in Dracula fandom, which was only tangential to Lovecraft.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

The Call of the Friend (2025) by JaeHoon Choi (최재훈) trans. Janet Hong

THE CALL OF THE FRIEND is part of the Lovecraft Reanimated project, where leading Korean speculative fiction writers reimagine the works of horror master H.P. Loveccraft, while honoring his eerie, grotesque imagery and the blurred boundaries between reality and fantasy, they update his ideas for a global audience.
—The Call of the Friend (2025), inside cover flap

The Call of the Friend (친구의 부름) is a standalone black-and-white graphic novel by Korean comic artist and writer JaeHoon Choi (최재훈), first published in 2020. The English translation by Janet Hong was published in 2025 by Honford Star. The story is set in contemporary urban Korea, where university student Wonjun checks in on his friend Jingu, whose sister (a K-pop idol) has recently committed suicide, implicitly because of a scandalous affair. It is in Jingu’s apartment that Wonjun spots a strange idol.

The story that unspools is not a straightforward linear narrative. It is intimate, focused on Wonjun, with everyone other than Jingu essentially faceless. Readers get pieces of the puzzle, but the full story isn’t spelled out for them, readers are forced to interpret the evidence as best they can. In this, they are given a single helpful hint in a short essay at the end of the book:

Some live a life of violence, while others make every effort to avoid stepping on an insect. But no matter the severity or type of sin, the moment we realize we have sinned, we experience fear. The fear isn’t so much the dread of punishment or retribution. It stems from the knowledge that we’ve hurt someone or caused their unhappiness, and the sin manifests as fear. Depending on the intensity of this fear, we can either be liberated from our guilt or ensnared by it.

While I don’t want the theme to be too obvious in this story, I hope readers might be able to tangibly experience Wonjun’s guilt. These long, nocturnal reflections on our current human condition, set against H. P. Lovecraft’s world of unexplained fears, have prompted me to contemplate the words we’ve spoken, the conflict and guilt we’ve endured, as well as the subsequent death and feat they cause.
—The Call of the Friend (2025), 104-105

As an essay, it is slightly reminiscent of Arthur Machen’s prologue to “The White People” on ‘sorcery & sanctity.’ The idea of fear as a fundamental response to a transgression—an instinctive response to some imbalance caused by action or inaction—and that this fear can liberate or ensnare guilt, has its attractions. Yet how does this philosophical approach jive with Lovecraft’s famous proclamation that “the strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”?

When you don’t know what the sin was. When the only way you have to measure how badly you’ve hurt someone is the measure of the fear you feel in response to it. Whether this is what JaeHoon Choi intended with The Call of the Friend I cannot say, but the presence of the Cthulhu Mythos in this story is suggestive of something that goes beyond tawdry K-pop star drama and the suicide of the sister of a friend. It suggests that there’s something much bigger at work here, something unseen and unknowable, and it threatens to ensnare Wonjun entirely.

The Call of the Friend is somewhat reminiscent of Minetaro Mochizuki’s Hauntress (1993) in general outline—both of them deal with young university students living on their own, the one checking in on the other to whom something has happened, and with a supernatural horror creeping into their lives—and more importantly, that sensation of an urban legend unfolding in a space of familiar, contemporary surroundings. These are characters ill-equipped to deal with the psychological terrors of their experiences. They have no strong faith, no occult skills or leanings. They are regular people, with limited resources, facing the uncanny.

That works. JaeHoon Choi takes advantage of the prosaic setting and characters to make the distortions of perception all the more disturbing for taking place in setting of absolute reality. Readers will question how much of this is in Wonjun’s head, will wonder when we slip into dream, hallucination, or twisted memory. The idol forms a locus of manifestation, a central image to embody what it is happening, but even until the end, readers have to decide how much of this is really happening.

The comic ends like an unresolved chord. Readers don’t get answers. Only the impression that they have witnessed something. Perhaps that is the answer itself.

Janet Hong’s translation of the graphic novel into English is very readable and smooth. While most of the graphic novel itself has relatively sparse dialogue, the essay at the end is very clear and easy to understand, and a valuable key to understanding the work.

The Call of the Friend (2025) by JaeHoon Choi and translated by Janet Hong is available at the Honford Star website as an ebook or softcover.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“All Is Illusion” (1940) by C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner

Four years after H. P. Lovecraft introduced them by mail, on 7 June 1940, Henry Kuttner, Jr. married Catherine Lucille Moore in New York City. Kuttner was 25, Moore was 29. The witnesses were Mrs. Beverly Claire Finlay (wife of the Weird Tales artist Virgil Finlay) and Mrs. Annie Kuttner (the groom’s mother). It would mark both a new personal and professional chapter in the life of both writers.

Moore no longer had her job. Kuttner had no other source of employment; his draft registration card, filed in 1940, lists him as self-employed, and his agent Julius Schwartz as his next of kin. They both needed to buckle down to write, and having already completed their first collaboration in “Quest of the Starstone” (1937), they may well have continued. Certainly, after their marriage, they formed one of the most formidable writing teams in pulp magazine history:

Chacal: Did you ever have any reservations about collaborating with Kuttner?

Moore: Nope. “The Quest of the Star Stone,” our first, worked out well enough to show us we could do it and after that we never gave it much thought. We just went ahead and wrote, either separately or together, depending on how that particular piece of work progressed. Remember, we weren’t turning out stories for posterity, but for this month’s rent. I so often hear of collaborators who tear down each other’s work—even successful, long-established collaborators. We didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense. We just traded typewriters; when one got stuck the other took over with a minimum of rewriting. Often none at all. Usually none at all. With us, at least, it worked out fine. It was also very nice to have somebody who could take over when the other guy got stuck. We sincerely loved each other’s writing and enjoyed tremendously what came out of the other guy’s typewriter. It was a fine relationship.
—“Interview: C. L. Moore Talks To Chacal” in Chacal #1 (1976), 30

One friend of the married couple actually got a chance to witness this in practice:

Hank came feeling his was downstairs, and, as he located the coffee, the typewriter upstairs began to make noises. One half hour, maybe three-quarters, we’d had our morning coffee, and Hank said something about going upstairs and getting dressed. He disappeared.

They didn’t pass each other on the stairs, but Catherine turned up very shortly afterward, reconstructed the coffee, which Hank and I had finished, and I had my second wake-up with her—with the typewriter going on at the same rate upstairs. Once more, say three-quarters of an hour passed, and Catherine said something about getting into day clothes, and disappeared. Hanke came down, dressed, and said something cheerful about breakfast—with the typewriter going on as usual. This went on. They worked at it in shifts, in relays, continuously, until about two o’clock that Saturday afternoon, when the one downstairs did not go upstairs when the one upstairs came down. This time the typing stopped.

[…] I learned later, from John [Campbell], that they always worked that way, and worked so well at it that the only way he could tell who had written what was if the word ‘gray’ came in the story. One of them habitually spelled it ‘grey.’
—George O. Smith, The Worlds of George O. Smith (1982) 31

“Grey” is the preferred British spelling, and Moore had a tendency to use it in her private letters (although in publication, editors had their own way, e.g. “The Cold Gray God” (1935) by C. L. Moore). Moore commented on their differences in writing:

CA: People have trouble, don’t they, identifying which stories are yours and which are collaborations?

MOORE: Well, mine were probably a good deal more verbose, and I tended to have compound sentences. Henry wrote very tersely. That’s about the only difference, except that I was greatly prone to adjectives and so forth, and he got his effect over without quite so much embellishment. There was a distinct difference, but in most cases I think not enough for the general reader to be aware of.
—Interview with C. L. Moore in Contemporary Authors vol. 104, 327

Kuttner’s view on Moore’s style is paraphrased by Guy Amory:

Kuttner likes the way C. L. Moore writes (and who doesn’t). He wishes he could write like her—but claims that when he tries imitating it comes out so much trash. If you’ve read any of his stories you realize that Hank is a master of the bingety-boom type of fiction—but with feeling! He puts more Incident in ten pages of Elak than any other author in WEIRD, and makes you feel it. He paints his picture with masterfully abrupt dabs, while Moore lays on her horror with the touch of a mosaic master, building up. Kuttner knocks you down and keeps you bouncing. Moore swirls you in cobwebs and totes you away into infinity. Combining their efforts in ’37 for QUEST OF THE STARSTONE they turned out something to remember … with Hank’s flair for lightning pace and Moore’s for description they went to town.
—Guy Amory, “Is It True What They Say About Kuttner?”
in Future Fantasia (1939) vol. 1, no. 2

Because of the way they worked, it isn’t possible to discern, after 7 July 1940, which stories were written by husband or wife; they both collaborated so intimately that most stories are attributed to them both, even if they appeared under the byline Henry Kuttner. The exception is stories that appeared under C. L. Moore’s own byline, these are believed to be largely or entirely her own work. While everyone has their theories, attributing stories like the Hogben Chronicles to Kuttner or “The Twonky” to Moore, there isn’t any real way to tell. With this marriage of personalities and talents, Moore had ended the first stage of her professional career and entered a new one.

“All Is Illusion” was first published in Unknown Apr 1940, as by Henry Kuttner. It has sometimes also been credited to Moore-and-Kuttner, and not unreasonably so: there’s no reason to suspect that Moore and Kuttner weren’t collaborating before their marriage, and the strong shift in Moore’s later science fiction in stories like “Miracle in Three Dimensions” (1939) and “Greater Than Gods” (1939) show at least Kuttner’s influence on her style, if not some active cooperation. So what can we say about who wrote “All Is Illusion” for Unknown?

Moore looked around for the waiter, but could not locate him in the swirling gray smoke.
—”All Is Illusion” in Unknown Apr 1940

The comment on “gray” vs. “grey” might be seen as a clue, but unfortunately, that only works if we have the original manuscript to work with. Editors tend to impose their own spellings on stories that appear in their magazines, and most American editors during the period preferred “gray.”

The story itself is, if not a shaggy dog story, then something very closely akin to it. To work, it requires a certain suspension of disbelief and a familiarity with at least the broad outlines of Classical mythology, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, because it is framed as an anecdote and presented as an intrusion of fantasy into a contemporary setting. There is no world-building as such, and very little explanation; the story even borrows on some of the most well-worn tropes available for such a tale:

Moore turned.

The tavern was gone. Only the empty lot remained.
—”All Is Illusion” in Unknown Apr 1940

This intrusion of familiar fantasy in a contemporary setting with the addition of a strong comedic tone, rather than being played for horror or moralism, is a Hallmark of the 1940s fantasy published in Unknown. Darker shades of similar ideas would be played with by Ray Bradbury and Robert Bloch, and more serious attempts would be the playground of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, but here in this story we get the surreal, the fantastic, the hallucinatory all in a setting of very firmly established reality.

There is little about this story that screams “C. L. Moore wrote me.” The early fantasy section, with the disappearing tavern inhabited by the mythological figures, I can easily believe might have been a C. L. Moore section; so too, the reference to Midsummer Eve echoes “Miracle in Three Dimensions” (1939) and the transformations in Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The details about New York read more like the kind of thing Henry Kuttner would pick up on. Humor and ridiculous happenings were not a strong aspect of C. L. Moore’s early work, but both are strongly present here. The prose itself does not read hugely different from either of their individual works from the period.

There is no strong reason to either suspect or deny C. L. Moore’s involvement in this story. It was credited to Henry Kuttner on publication, and is only co-credited to Moore afterward because of the revelation of the nature of their collaboration, but the seamless nature of that collaboration means trying to pick and choose between whether a story is a Moore tale or a Kuttner tale is ultimately a false choice. The two writers came together during the late 1930s, and the fusion of their work in 1940 gave way to something new and largely indistinguishable from its parts.

The fat old man arose and went toward the back. He passed close to Moore’s table, and, glancing aside, said in a kindly voice, “All is Maya—illusion.” He hiccuped, drew himself up in a dignified manner, and hastily continued his journey into the smoke.
—”All Is Illusion” in Unknown Apr 1940

Scans of “All Is Illusion” are available online at the Internet Archive.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Chosen” (2015) by Lyndsey Holder

Brown Jenkin was agitated, running circles around me, climbing up my back and crawling down into my lap, staring at me with his beady black eyes. I reached out to him tentatively and he nuzzled my hand, stirring a strange kind of love in my heart.
—Lyndsey Holder, “Chosen” in She Walks in Shadows (2015) 160

Familiar horrors inspire a kind of wish-fulfillment. Thousands of readers of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat have imagined what it would be like to be undead, ageless and powerful, bound by night and loosed from the morals of humanity. Roleplaying games like Werewolf: the Apocalypse let fans of werewolf movies and lore vicariously embody the power and ferocity of the change. Contemporary witches look back at the witch trials and pay tribute to those hypothetical ancestors, sometimes drawing imaginary connections to the persecuted of Salem Village in the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

Lovecraftian horrors are not so familiar as vampires and werewolves, and so there are fewer who wish to truly meet or embody those horrors. Fewer readers express a desire to be Pickman-esque ghouls than to become vampires, though more than a few would happily undergo the change into a Deep One and dwell in wonder and glory forever beneath the waves. While there are a few Lovecraftian witches, occultists like Keziah Mason and Joseph Curwen are often still figures of horror, not mentors or figures of nostalgia akin to Dracula.

“Chosen” by Lyndsey Holder thus enters a rather scarce territory. We very often see Keziah Mason presented as the stereotypical witch, the old hag with the familiar, steeped in the blood libel of child sacrifice from old legends. Sometimes, rarely, we see her as the archetypal Lovecraftian witch, the one who embodies the kind of freedom, wisdom, and power—and attracts the kind of prosecution—that embodies the more mythical ancestors of contemporary Wiccans, as inspired by The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921) by Margaret A. Murray.

Holder’s story is very short, just six pages long, short and to the point, and all too easy to spoil. The biggest unanswered question might be why the nameless girl protagonist is a child in Vancouver, very far from Arkham as the broom flies. However, Lyndsey Holder is herself Canadian. Maybe there’s a bit of wish-fulfillment in this story, a fictional accounting of a pilgrimage she would have taken if the dreams had come to her. Certainly, Mythos fans can appreciate why they might save and scrimp to travel thousands of miles just to be there, where horror once walked. More than a few fans stride the streets of Providence and Salem every year, after all, thinking of Lovecraft and witches.

The horror in this story doesn’t really come from Keziah Mason or her familiar Brown Jenkin. They are familiar figures, and there is something comforting in their portrayal. The horror in the story is how the protagonist reacts to them, how her life changes when they become a part of it. The ending is certainly a fitting one. Not every Lovecraft fan would choose that way to become a part of the Mythos, but for those who are given a chance to be part of the story…well, a few readers at least will understand.

“Chosen” by Lyndsey Holder was published in She Walks in Shadows (2015) and its reprints, it has not otherwise been republished.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate” I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Fruit of Knowledge” (1940) by C. L. Moore

By the way, I suppose they warned you about the Tree?
—C. L. Moore, “Fruit of Knowledge” in Unknown Oct 1940

After her marriage to Henry Kuttner on 7 June 1940 in New York City, C. L. Moore’s byline appears only sporadically in magazines and novels. Most of their work, written together, would appear under his name, or that of a shared pseudonym such as Lewis Padgett. It is impossible, at this point, to say who wrote what—with one notable exception: the stories still published under Moore’s name are agreed to have been primarily, if not entirely, her own work with little involvement from her husband and writing partner.

The first story published under C. L. Moore’s own name after her marriage is “Fruit of Knowledge” in Unknown Oct 1940, and it is a major departure from Moore’s previous and much of her future work as far as content. The scene is a retelling of a part of the book of Genesis from the Old Testament, about the creation of Eve and Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. As such, the general gist of the plot is familiar to most readers; they have heard this story before and know how it ends. This is a story where all the attraction is in the telling of the tale.

In telling this tale, Moore reaches outside the Christian Bible and borrows the character of Lilith from the Jewish Talmud and folklore. Lilith was something of a favorite of the Weird Tales crowd, with Moore’s friend and fellow Lovecraft correspondent E. Hoffmann Price having written stories like “Queen of the Lilin” (Weird Tales Nov 1934) and “Well of the Angels” (Unknown May 1940), and others composing poems to her. A quintessence of evil and femininity, which are both alluring on their own, but together are especially powerful.

The story that unfolds is primarily from Lilith’s point of view, and holds many of the hallmarks of Moore’s style: the beauty of both men and women are emphasized, the characters driven by strong emotions, the prose sensuous, and there is that subtle ironic humor which had increasingly become prominent in Moore’s writing, the element that draws her more in line with Kuttner and the 1940s style of fantastic fiction which Unknown would become known for.

The re-use of a familiar story, retold in a very contemporary way, is somewhat similar to “Miracle in Three Dimensions” (1939), but here Moore needs no special device to lay the scene. She simply dives right in, and the characters speak in familiar accents, not attempting Biblical diction of the King James Version, so that characters say “you” and not “thou” or “thee” (with a few exceptions when Moore is taking the words more or less directly from the Bible.) If it is slightly blasphemous—God is not depicted as either omniscient or omnipotent—it is still an effective little drama, where the characters have their clear motivations and struggles, their plans and plots, their complications and upsets. Even knowing how it’s going to end, the story is told well enough that readers might want to see how, exactly, things play out.

“The woman thou gavest me—he began reproachfully, and then hesitated, meeting Eve’s eyes. The old godlike goodness was lost to him now, but he had not fallen low enough yet to let Eve know what he was thinking. He could not say, “The woman Thou gavest me has ruined us both—but I had a woman of my own before her and she never did me any harm.” No, he could not hurt this flesh of his flesh so deeply, but he was human now and he could not let her go unrebuked. He went on sulkily, “—she gave me the apple, and I ate.”
—C. L. Moore, “Fruit of Knowledge” in Unknown Oct 1940

Moore doesn’t seek to soften the essentially patriarchal nature of the Biblical story, though neither is this a proto-feminist take. Lilith is essentially deceitful, jealous, possessive, and finally vindictive; then again, when the bloom is off the rose, Adam blames Eve like a little boy pointing to his sister and saying she did it. Eve herself gets far less character development than Lilith, being largely passive, reactive, manipulated, and a possession to be granted where Lilith is proactive and makes more of her own choices. As a biblical commentary it might not have much to add, but as an entry in the seemingly interminable corpus of “fictional reimaginings of Biblical tales,” it’s not bad.

There is no indication of when Moore wrote this story or why; a story could take months to be published in a pulp magazine, and she might have written it before or after her marriage. Maybe it was that life event that spurred her interest in the old tale, or a chance to reframe the old story through her own eyes. We don’t know. Yet for a while, it was the last that the pulp magazines would see of C. L. Moore byline—on her own.

Scans of “Fruit of Knowledge” are available online at the Internet Archive.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Body to Body to Body” (2015) by Selena Chambers

Every woman’s body is a story, you see.
—Selena Chambers, “Body to Body to Body” in She Walks in Shadows (2015) 132

Lovecraftian genealogical narratives tend to focus on a single, often the paternal, line. What that tends to exclude is a large number of other ancestors and relatives: mothers, grandmothers, aunts, cousins, sisters, half-sisters, and step-siblings. Writers following Lovecraft were not averse to filling out and following other branches of various family trees. August Derleth’s “The Shuttered Room” (1959) follows some Whateley cousins, for example, and Lavinia Rising (2022) by Farah Rose Smith expands on Lavinia Whateley’s background.

These Mythos family reunion stories are often a bit contradictory; that’s the point. By expanding on unspoken relations, authors have the opportunity to give alternative narratives, fresh viewpoints, different and more complex takes on a set of events or individuals. That’s how myth cycles—and, more often than not, family stories, repeated in games of telephone down generations—tend to work. Readers get to balance the narratives and decide for themselves what “really” happened.

Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth blood now.
—H. P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep”

“Body to Body to Body” by Selena Chambers is set up chronologically as an immediate sequel to Lovecraft’s “The Thing in the Doorstep,” and narratively is structured in parallel: the police are interviewing a suspect, and she tells her tale. What marks this story as different is that the interviewee is Asenath Waite’s half-sister—from before their mother’s marriage to Ephraim Waite—and so the events she relates are largely a prequel to Lovecraft’s tale, expanding on Asenath’s background and childhood. How she became who she became, in every sense of the word.

Like “The Thing on the Cheerleader Squad” (2015) by Molly Tanzer and other stories that spin out of Lovecraft’s original, this story explores a different relationship dynamic with Asenath and Ephraim. In Lovecraft’s original story, questions of identity ultimately make Asenath a victim, overpowered and replaced by her father’s mind; stories like Tanzer and Chambers give Asenath more agency, and more of an identity of her own distinct from her father’s.

Chambers’ depiction of the Waite’s home life makes no bones about Ephraim Waite as a bigoted old occultist; it feels like there might be a hint of Lovecraft in the portrayal, reminiscent of how Mexican Gothic (2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia borrows some characterization from Lovecraft for its villain. However, the real delight in the story is the little details from the protagonist’s point of view, the hints of Innsmouth culture that go beyond Mythos lore and speak of lived experience in the town. And it offers an alternative ending to “The Thing on the Doorstep” which is more hopeful than Lovecraft’s vision.

“Boby to Body to Body” by Selena Chambers was published in She Walks in Shadows (2015) and its variations. It has not otherwise been reprinted.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate” I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Song in a Minor Key” (1940) by C. L. Moore

Well, here was Earth beneath him. No longer a green star high in alien skies, but warm soil, new clover so near his face he could see all the little stems and trefoil leaves, moist earth granular at their roots.
—C. L. Moore, “Song in a Minor Key”

“The Green Hills of Earth” is as close to an anthem as C. L. Moore gave to Northwest Smith. His adventures take place almost exclusively on alien worlds. He is an outlaw, an adventurer, a hard man and not necessarily a noble one, but not without his honor or his principles. Raymond Chandler wrote in “The Simple Art of Murder” (1944) that the protagonists of hardboiled tales must be “the best man in his world and; a good enough man for any world.” He didn’t write that about Northwest Smith, but he might have.

What is “Song in a Minor Key?” It is the last of Moore’s works about Northwest Smith. It might have been a fragment of a story never completed, it might have been a coda. In a series that is never marked by any particular notions of continuity or character development, it offers both. Not a reflection on Smith’s adventures, but of the mysterious past never really spoken of elsewhere, and of a future: Smith is back on Earth. He’s there amid his green hills at last. Why, and for how long, we don’t know.

In a way, “Song in a Minor Key” is reminiscent of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Silver Key.” Both are stories that deal with a reflection on childhood, happier times, but where Randolph Carter’s dream is to retrieve that key and relive the past, Northwest Smith’s approach to such nostalgic wishing is harsh. He knows who he is and what he has done; he knows, too, that he could not have done anything different. Faced with the same circumstances, even with all the knowledge of twenty years on the run, he would kill again—and end up right where we saw him, in dingy Martian spaceports or hunkering in a Venusian alley, exploring dead cities and strange worlds.

Maybe this was a goodbye to the character that had launched C. L. Moore into her pulp career, even though it feels like the opening of a new adventure. Which, perhaps, is fitting. Series characters in the pulps rarely had arcs; they rarely had a definite retirement or death. When Robert E. Howard wrote the adventures of characters like Solomon Kane, Kull of Atlantis, Bran Mak Morn, and Conan the Cimmerian, he never wrote their deaths—he might jump back and forth to different points in their lives, show Conan as a brash young thief in one tale and a conquering monarch in the next—and there was the certain sense that in the fullness of time these men were mortal and they would die. We even see the cult of Bran Mak Morn rise up, with the knowledge that he died on some ancient battlefield. But we never see it, we never get the send-off, the heroes do not ride off into the sunset and tell us that this is the end.

For the readers of Weird Tales who thrilled to the adventures of Northwest Smith for six years, the tales just…stopped. There were no more. The magazine itself changed its focus. “Song in a Minor Key” was published in the fanzines Scienti-Snaps (Feb 1940). She was still Catherine Lucille Moore when this was published; she would marry Harry Kuttner on 7 June 1940, in New York City. Moving on into the next phase of her life, and her writing career. Much of what she wrote from this point on would be with Kuttner, her husband and writing partner, and would appear under his name or a shared pseudonym. Relatively few works were signed C. L. Moore after 1940.

This was one of the last pieces we can say was truly her own voice, unalloyed.

Scans of the original publication of “Song in a Minor Key” are not currently available, but the text is available at Project Gutenberg.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Blessed Be Her Children” (2025) by Jessi Vasquez

The religious rites varied according to circumstances and the requirements of the people. The greater number of the ceremonies appear to have been practised for the purpose of securing fertility. Of these the sexual ritual has been given an overwhelming and quite unwarranted importance in the trials, for it became an obsession with the Christian judges and recorders to investigate the smallest and most minute details of the rite. Though in late examples the ceremony had possibly degenerated into a Bacchanalian orgy, there is evidence to prove that, like the same rite in other countries, it was originally a ceremonial magic to ensure fertility.
—Margaret Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe (1921)

The conception of Shub-Niggurath as a fertility figure in Lovecraft’s artificial mythology, presented or hinted at in “The Mound” (1940) by Zealia Bishop & H. P. Lovecraft, has always carried with it certain implications. In the early 20th-century anthropological context, “fertility rites” in religion applied to humans, animals, and vegetables. There were rites to conceive and safely deliver children, to grow more crops, to have domestic animals increase in number. The sexual connotations were clear and sometimes salacious.

This was before in vitro fertilization or genetic engineering, before hormonal birth control or effective medical gender transition. Before contemporary labels like ace and aro. The anthropological perspective rarely took into account the vast diversity of reproductive schemes in nature, most of which don’t apply to humans and domestic animals; it did absorb a lot of the cultural norms regarding gender and sexual identity, and the reproductive focus of fertility cults in the literature can bear some strange parallels to reproductive abuse and pregnancy fetishism.

This is the heritage of Shub-Niggurath in the 21st century: one of the rare identified-as-female divinities (or at least entities) in the Cthulhu Mythos, and her cult is often treated as effectively the Quiverfull movement with optional magic and monsters. While that may be a simplification for a diverse array of works that run from “Shub-Niggurath’s Witnesses” (2015) by Valerie Valdes to “The Shadow over Des Moines” (2016) by Lisabet Sarai, the important takeaway is that Shub-Niggurath and her cult have been primarily shaped by early 20th-century ideas of sexuality and reproductive biology.

What does Shub-Niggurath have to offer if you’re asexual, transgender, gay, or just never want to have kids?

As for the rest of the idealistic traditional family concept, you know I never had any real interest in men. I guess I should have been more open about my romantic endeavors. I would have been, if I’d known you thought I was holding back for your sake. You suspected there was something with Rachel, and briefly, there was. There were also a few people in college of varying genders, and while I sometimes felt deep affection, I discovered I’m not terribly interested in physical intimacy. And I don’t feel like my life is incomplete without it.

I love cake. I love cozy mystery novels and sad romance movies. I love my friends, I love Liriope, I love you. And that’s enough. I wish I’d made this clearer to you.
—Jessi Vasquez, “Blessed Be Her Children” in Tales of Shub-Niggurath (2025) 192

“Blessed Be Her Children” by Jessi Vasquez is told in mostly epistolary format; as a series of journal entries, sometimes addressed to specific readers, in a contemporary setting involving a young divorced single mother, her daughter, and her older sister. This is a woman’s story, told from a woman’s perspective, dealing with the messy, complicated mess of faith and something more than faith as their relationships get tangled up with a cult that has an unnerving focus on fertility. The story is not explicitly set in the Cthulhu Mythos; it doesn’t need to drop Shub-Niggurath’s name to draw the familiar associations with goatish imagery associated with the cult. Yet it is very much written, at least in part, in response to how we look at Shub-Niggurath now compared to in 1940.

One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered, but it had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious. What he liked least of all were the emotional sounds emitted by the celebrants—jarring sounds in a race that had ceased to use vocal speech for ordinary purposes.
—H. P. Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop, “The Mound”

Lovecraft never presents Shub-Niggurath from a woman’s perspective. He very rarely addresses pregnancy and birth in the Mythos from the viewpoint of anyone who might have to gestate something and push it out of their body in forty weeks or so. Lavinia Whateley has a few lines in “The Dunwich Horror,” but that’s only afterward. Readers don’t get to see what joy or fear, horror or gratitude, disgust or distress that she felt at the conception of conception, pregnancy, and birth. The whole viewpoint of reproductive horror from a woman’s perspective came to the Mythos relatively late, and is still being explored in stories like “In His Daughter’s Darkling Womb” (1997) by Tina L. Jens and “A Thousand Young” (2025) by Andrea Pearson.

So Vasquez’s approach in “Blessed Be Her Children” is interesting. It is a rebellion against the default program that the cultists are running. The cult, rather than adapt to changing ideas, is still serving what is essentially an ultraconservative agenda: be fruitful and multiply, on our terms. “Blessed Be Her Children” isn’t a polemic in the guise of a piece of fiction, but it is correctly trying to portray a predatory religious group (that happens to be a Mythos cult) whose central ethos doesn’t take into account that nowadays not everyone is heterosexual and looking to have kids.

“Blesssed Be Her Children” by Jessi Vasquez was published in Tales of Shub-Niggurath (2025).

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

“Greater Than Gods” (1939) by C. L. Moore

If a man could see the end of his act, the end that comes at the far end of Time, and know what it meant—would men be greater than gods?
—Editor’s opening to C. L. Moore’s “Greater Than Gods” in Astounding Jul 1939

C. L. Moore had cut her teeth on interplanetary fiction. Yet the syntax of science fiction was changing, and her approach was shifting with it. Instead of the grungy spaceports of Northwest Smith or the alien cosmic soul-mates of “The Bright Illusion” (1934), “Greater Than Gods” opens up with a Science City divided into separate houses (including Telepathy House), and a very ancient, prosaic situation: a man torn between two women.

The story seems to be a further extrapolation of “Tryst in Time” (1936), working through another iteration of time travel theory:

I think of the future as an infinite reservoir of an infinite number of futures, each of them fixed, yet malleable as clay. Do you see what I mean? At every point along our way we confront crossroads at which we make choices among the many possible things we may do the next moment. Each crossroad leads to a different future, all of them possible, all of them fixed, waiting for our choice to give them reality.
—C. L. Moore, “Greater Than Gods” in Astounding Jul 1939

However, it’s also a kind of a gadget story. The protagonist, William Cory, head of Biology House, was on the trail of figuring out sex determination:

The pups were the living proof of Bill’s success in prenatal sex determination—six litters of squirming maleness with no female among them. They represented the fruit of long, painstaking experiments in the X-ray bombardment of chromosomes to separate and identify the genes carrying the factors of sex
determination, of countless failures and immeasurable patience. If the pups grew into normal dogs—well, it would be one long, sure stride nearer the day when, through Bill’s own handiwork, the world would be perfectly balanced bebetween male and female in exact proportion to the changing need.
—C. L. Moore, “Greater Than Gods” in Astounding Jul 1939

The problem that comes as Cory looks down the trousers of time, as Terry Pratchett put it, is that slowly more and more women were being born. The story becomes a thought-experiment on gender politics. Quite literally:

Women in public offices were proving very efficient; certainly they governed more peacefully than men. The first woman president won her office on a platform that promised no war so long as a woman dwelt in the White House.

Of course, some things suffered under the matriarchy. Women as a sex are not scientists, not inventors, not mechanics or engineers or architects. There were men enough to keep these essentially masculine arts alive—that is, as much of them as the new world needed.
—C. L. Moore, “Greater Than Gods” in Astounding Jul 1939

There are parallels here with David H. Keller’s “The Feminine Metamorphosis” (1929); a blatant, naked sexism that was not uncommon to the time. However, and here is the second twist, Bill Cory gets a glimpse down the other trouser-leg of time, into a world where his own experiments led to a eugenic future:

The first “X-ray” babies began to be born. Without exception they were fine, strong, healthy infants, and without exception of the predetermined sex. The Council was delighted; the parents were delighted; everyone was delighted except Bill.
—C. L. Moore, “Greater Than Gods” in Astounding Jul 1939

Both futures have their flaws, which is the point. It’s a moral conflict, the results deliberately exaggerated. The solution, when Cory arrives at it, is almost ludicrous—a polite fiction on the standards and morals of the age, when proposals were made and accepted more seriously—but it works, it’s true to its own internal logic.

The weird irony to the tale, the search for a third option when presented with an impossible choice, is very much in the vein of 1940s science fiction. How much influence, if any, Henry Kuttner had on this tale is impossible to tell; it has only ever been published under Moore’s name. Yet if she wrote it all on her own, then Moore had fully absorbed the influence of how science fiction was trending. It is a story that speaks to what her future work would look like.

“Greater Than Gods” was published in the July 1939 issue of Astounding. Scans of this issue are available on the Internet Archive.

Bobby Derie is the author of Weird Talers: Essays on Robert E. Howard and Others and Sex and the Cthulhu Mythos.

Deep Cuts in a Lovecraftian Vein uses Amazon Associate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.